Faith The Emotion

On a blog like Love and the Planet, basic emotions that nobody else talks about are important.

This past decade, faith was used more and more as a substituted word for religion. "Do you have a faith?" has taken the place of "What religion do you belong to?"

Faith is not religion. Faith is an emotion. As an emotion, faith is necessary for religion, but religion is not necessary to have faith.

What is faith? Is it just belief? (A belief can be momentary, and short-lived. Faith implies a long-term belief, one that will last a long time. ) It helps to have other beliefs to keep faith, but faith can be kept by itself without any helping beliefs. For example, if you keep faith in your partner, it might help to believe that your partner will always be there for you. On the other hand, even if you did not believe that they would always be there, you could still keep faith in him/her.

Have faith.
Keep faith.

We all know people who have no faiths ever.
We know others who have no faiths sometimes.
And then the others who always have faiths yet never seem to keep the same ones.
Finally there are those who always have and keep the same faiths all their lives.

"Which is better?" This is not necessary to judge. "Which has it easier on themselves?" "Which does more for others and the planet?" These questions are more important.

Finally the most important propositions:

1. Faith in persons can inspire them to live up to your faith.
2. To have faith and be disappointed can logically be a more successful life/game strategy than to have no faith at all.

Is this good or bad? Some of both of course.

Clearly faith is a social emotion used by social animals to achieve group goals. So every wolf in a wolf pack has faith in their team when they go out on their hunt. So every sheep in the herd has faith in the herd when they idly graze.

Faith is also an individual emotion used by lone animals to determine specialised behaviour. A bird that sets out on a 5000 mile migration, has faith that it will arrive there alive, and that it will find food and nesting there. The faith can be disappointed, for example if man has already destroyed the habitat to build an airport, a container seaport, or to farm soya beans. Yet without the faith, such specialised behaviour can never develop, and is never put to the test.

Faith, then, is a fundamental emotion of life and living things and of the complexity of the ecosystem itself.

On Love and the Planet, you must have faith in emotions, just as you have faith in logic, and you must have faith in logic, just as you have faith in emotions. For emotional logic and logical emotions are the essence of organic intelligence as distinguished from artificial intelligence.